SLACK MESSAGE FROM ROGER LUDERMORE TO CHARLOTTE THORNE, 8:08 PM: what’s the password to dropbox
SLACK MESSAGE FROM ROGER LUDERMORE TO CHARLOTTE THORNE, 8:13 PM: need it now
TEXT MESSAGE FROM NINA DORANTES TO CHARLOTTE THORNE, 8:16 PM: Are you ok?
Still nothing from Jackie.
Misty sneezed. Her tiny face scrunched up and her whole body shuddered with the force of it. Reece laughed. He swept the dog up into his arms like an overgrown baby. “You got the sniffles, little one?” he cooed, his voice dark honey. “You’re okay, Uncle Reece has got you.”
That answered that question. There was no way she could choose answering Roger’s Slack messages over snack time with the cutest dog uncle on campus. Charlotte slid her phone back into her pocket. “Fine. But those Oreos are on you. I used my last dollar as a tip.”
—
Reece had all the good gossip. On their way back to the dorm, he filled Charlotte in on the life updates of Hein’s bro population. Reece’s best friend Garrett was still single but deeply devoted to Misty. His freshman-year roommate had started a monthly subscription box that sent you beauty products based on your astrological sign.
They paused outside Rosenberg Hall, a stunning Châteauesque building with brick walls and dark-shingled turrets that housed the psychology department. Misty was unimpressed by the 1880s architecture and took a leisurely pee on the granite front steps.
Charlotte searched her memory for the name of the third bro in his tight friend group. “How’s Liam?”
“He’s good! He’ll be here tomorrow.” Misty tugged him into a brisk walk, and Charlotte loped along to keep up. “He got married last year.”
“Excuse me?” Charlotte didn’t know Liam all that well, but he was hardly her pick for the first husband in the clique. Future weed brownie distributor, maybe.
Reece laughed at the shocked expression on her face. “I know, I know. He reconnected with his high school sweetheart at a reunion. A year later, bam, I was picking out a rice cooker at Williams Sonoma.”
“That’s nuts.” A startling number of their classmates were making progress in the direction of marriage. She wouldn’t be surprised if an invitation for Matt and Jio’s nuptials arrived in her mailbox soon, assuming they didn’t dismiss that kind of legal commitment as buying into the hetero-patriarchal wedding industrial complex.
“Good for him,” she marveled.
They’d made it back to Randall. She held the door open so that Misty could race inside the lobby, with Reece quick on her heels. Sound ricocheted toward them from the lounge down the hall, and she winced, covering her ears with her hands automatically.
“Sounds like the party relocated,” Reece said. “Let me get her back to Garrett and then we’ll get snacks.”
Charlotte followed him to the lounge but hesitated on the threshold. By the looks of it, the after-party had been in full swing for a while. Maybe forty people drank and howled at each other in the cavernous room. Former art majors mingled with engineers. Batty the crypto-millionaire stirred jungle juice in a plastic tub for anyone brave enough to dip in a party cup.
Garrett stood beside the beer pong competition with some other folks from the Black Student Union. She watched as Reece handed Misty’s leash back to him.
Reece murmured something to Garrett, who gave him a sharp look before glancing around the room. When his eyes landed on her, his mouth immediately pulled into a scowl. Garrett’s message was crystal clear. Reece might have forgiven her, but to Garrett, she would always be the jerk who broke his best friend’s heart.
Charlotte stood up straight and clasped her hands behind her back. If Garrett wanted to hold a grudge, he could knock himself out.
Reece broke off the conversation and headed back toward her, a deceptively placid smile on his face.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
He nodded, his smile becoming authentic once again as he reached her side. “Snack time?”
“Absolutely.”
To Charlotte’s delight, the shitty vending machine in the ground-floor laundry room had been replaced by a brand-new model with a card reader and three different kinds of Oreos. Reece fed crumpled dollar bills into the machine as she debated Double Stuf versus Golden.
“Screw it, I’m honoring tradition,” she announced before pressing the code for the originals.
“Hell yeah.” Reece fished the cookies out of the drop tray and handed them over. “You’re sharing those, by the way.”
“Of course.” She helped herself to a cookie as he punched in his own selection and bent down to retrieve it: Famous Amos chocolate chip. “Good choice.”
Reece bowed his head like a falsely modest director winning an award. “Thank you, I have excellent taste.” He leaned his shoulder against the vending machine and peeled open his cookie pack. “Obviously,” he added, nodding in her direction.
Charlotte rolled her eyes but smiled despite herself. She couldn’t tell if his flirtation was intentional or just kindness, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to know anyway. Good thing she had a master’s degree in emotional compartmentalization.
Besides, she suspected he was just babysitting her until Jackie arrived.
She broke an Oreo in half and scraped the frosting off with her teeth, ravenous. Mid-chew, she offered him the other half. He raised an eyebrow but accepted the cookie.
“I’m part raccoon,” she explained after swallowing. “No dinner.”
“Ah.” Reece peered into his own bag and shook it. “Is it just me or did there used to be more of these in here?”
“Capitalism is a scam,” Charlotte said around a mouthful of chocolate mush. He laughed and she covered her mouth with her hand. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. You have great manners for a raccoon.” Reece offered her his bag and she plucked out a chocolate chip cookie as gracefully as she could manage.
“So,” he started, his voice gentle but serious. “How are you, really?”
Charlotte chewed her cookie slowly, grateful for the excuse not to answer right away. She could lie. It wouldn’t be hard. She could tell him about the celebrity founder and the pineapple allergy and the promotion Roger held over her head. She could overpronounce the consonants of The Front End Review and flash her teeth and swagger away with some excuse about how Slack messages don’t stop in the city that never sleeps.
But she couldn’t lie to Reece. She didn’t want to. Something about how attentively he looked at her made her want to tell him everything that had happened in the last five years—the ugly bits that didn’t make the small-talk supercut of postgrad life.
